Author: Rashmee Z Ahmed
Publications: The Times of India
Dated: December 4, 2001
London: Two days after 85 foreign
Taliban soldiers emerged blinking into the world from their subterranean
hell hole in Qalai-Jhangi fort near Mazar-i-Sharif, reports say there is
an India connection of sorts among some of the fighters and those they
fought.
The most revealing of these, according
to The Times, London, is the strange case of Abdul Hamid, formerly John
Philip Walker of Washington D.C. In an account as chilling as it is considered
incriminating for Pakistan's well-documented links with the Taliban, the
paper quotes Hamid to say he fought Indian troops in Kashmir, alongside
his Pakistani Taliban brethren.
The 20-year-old bearded and ragged
convert to Islam, with a distinctly educated American accent, said he joined
the Taliban six months ago, was taught to fire Kalashnikovs in an apparently
rites-of-passage experience and was subsequently despatched to Kashmir.
There, said the former Mr. Walker,
he fought Indian security forces alongside Pakistanis who made up the ranks
of the foreign militants prosecuting the cause of Kashmiri self-determination.
But it is not just those who fought
India who feature among the ranks of the scrawny, soot-blackened survivors
of the Qala-i-Jangi prison revolt. Among the 400 foreign fighters reported
to be held by the Northern Alliance at present, are several Indians, all
of whom reportedly claim they are being wrongly accused of fighting alongside
the Taliban.
One among them, according to British
domestic broadcaster Sky, is Javed Farooqui, an old man who apparently
finished up in Afghanistan by way of Britain and India.
Farooqui, who described his move
to Afghanistan in 1997 as part of the "search for a more spiritual, pious
life", denied he was ever a Taliban fighter.
He left his comfortable home in
Wembley, north London, to "live like a saint", he said and seemed to hold
his Pakistani fellow-prisoners in contempt.
"Most of them are from Pakistan
and they are uneducated," the former London bank employee disdainfully
told Sky TV's correspondent, who suggested that Farooqui's "English and
Indian roots" set the old man well apart from the herd.
The foreign ranks of the Taliban
have become a troubling part of an apparently fast concluding story of
bombing, bloodshed, death and justice.
According to human rights activists,
including the London-based Amnesty International, and the former John Walker,
British and Pakistani fighters are the only ones who could conceivably
be sent 'home', even if they ultimately faced trial for treason in the
US and UK.
Commentators acknowledge that the
disparate Arabs and Chechens are a lingering human problem because their
governments would be unable or unwilling to take them back. But no one,
least of all anyone in authority, has spoken so far of those claiming to
be Indian among the ranks.